In reply to E.T.Cook (@etc).

I haven't seen your spat with Chris Lema, but your blog post is beautifully written and quite right.

If anything, you're actually more generous to Lema than he probably deserves. His reaction to the iThemes hack demonstrates what happens when someone who has become a sort of community leader (whether he wanted that role or not) is shown to have been recommending someone else whose practices are seriously flawed.

He can either say that he messed up in making the recommendation without using his apparent friendship to find out some salient details (like how iThemes was storing its data), or he has to minimize the issue as "just a mistake."

If he had chosen the first option, presumably he'd now be revisiting all his significant recommendations to make sure that there isn't another surprise lurking. But he didn't, so he probably won't.

Does that mean that a similar episode with one of his "friends" is likely to happen? I don't know. But, if it does, I do know that he won't be able to say that that was just a mistake too. Otherwise few would listen to him again.